Neuroscientist traces roots of his drug addiction

CTV News:

Mark Lewis spent 15 years hooked on just about any drug you can think of: alcohol, LSD, cocaine, heroin, opium, prescription painkillers.

Today, he is a neuroscientist and professor of applied psychology at the University of Toronto, who had just written a new memoir, entitled “Memoirs of an Addicted Brain.”

But this is no drug addict tell-all. Instead, Lewis details honestly his life as an addict, while drawing on his knowledge of neuroscience and the brain’s workings to try to explain it. Lewis says he wanted to explain why brains get addicted and says it seemed only natural to use his own experience to do so.

“Your moment-to-moment experience: your thoughts and your feelings are all paralleled by things happening in your brain, of course. And it seemed possible to weave the two together and that’s what I was going for,” he told CTV’s Canada AM Wednesday.

Lewis believes the roots of his addiction trace back to his adolescence, when his parents sent him away for two years to a boarding school in Massachusetts. That’s where he began drinking and experimenting with getting high off cough syrup.